A text editor is one of the most important tools used to manage daily work. In particular specialized text editors for programming languages are required for enabling features such as syntax check, text formatting, filtering, and ability to handle encoded data. The most widely used text editors such as gedit, multiedit and the like provide basic functionalities such as text editing, cut, copy, paste, undo, redo and several other functionalities. However specialized text editors based on the user requirement are still seen at far.
During development of any code many a times there is a need to replace a particular function or a particular regular expression within the text editor with another modified one. In such scenarios the developers makes use of find and replace functionality. Till date, the existing market tools fail to provide find and replace functionality within multiple scopes based on user requirements.
In one of the publications by O'Reilly titled ‘Pattern Matching with Regular Expressions’, the process utilizes a JavaScript RegExp class to perform powerful pattern-matching and search-and-replace functions on text. However, the publication remains silent on implementing find and replace in multiple scopes thus making it a challenge till date.
Several find and replace tools like ‘Multiple File Search and Replace 2.2’ by Internet Soft Corporation and ‘Powergrep’ by Powergrepare is also available in the market that perform position and pattern based search. However, they do not provide warning tags especially from the perspective of code migration. Although the track mode functionality offered in Microsoft word is in similar lines with generating warning tags but implementing the same feature in a programming language is a tedious and challenging task due to the change in the type of content to be replaced. In Microsoft word the content is generally based on rules of a particular language and follows certain syntax of the language. However in a development environment the text editors must comply to the rules of all the programming languages which poses a formidable challenge for the developer.
US20080263443 of International Business Machines Corporation numbered selects inflected forms by applying pure lexico-syntactic transformations to enable find and replace feature. U.S. Pat. No. 5,873,660 checks for a search string within scope by finding the root word of the words in the search string. However these approaches fail when applied to programming languages and especially to regular expressions.
Moreover, the state of the art tools fail to comprehend to the issue of text alignment after replacement. This has been a major issue which leads to syntactical errors post migration of the code from one programming language to another programming language.
Moreover, ignoring specific portion between specific column positions say from 0th column to 6th position and 40th to 56th position and ignoring the chunks if it is present between the mentioned start and end ignore patterns of the files and searching the mentioned keywords/pattern in the remaining portion is not found implemented in the prior arts. Different file types can have different position ignoring mechanisms.
In the light of foregoing, there is a need for a tool that provides position and pattern based find and replace feature by defining multiple scopes within a text editor. Also in a development environment the demand for enabling warning tags to understand the changes made in the code is inevitable. Thus, there is a need of a solution for assisting the user to do a position and pattern based find and replace capable of replacing text within multiple scopes.